State audit accuses immigrant classes

Robert Salladay, EXAMINER CAPITOL BUREAU

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, July 21, 1999

SACRAMENTO - Millions of tax dollars may have been misused because the state failed to adequately monitor adult education programs that are supposed to turn tens of thousands of immigrants into U.S. citizens, a state audit reveals.

These "community-based organizations" fabricated student attendance records and test scores and failed to keep any records in some cases, a report by state Auditor Kurt Sjoberg says.

Auditors analyzed the programs for the past year and put the blame on state schools chief Delaine Eastin and her executives in Sacramento. Department of Education inspectors and officials "mismanaged oversight of the federal adult education program," auditors say. "As a result, several community organizations could not support services for which they were paid."

The Department of Education has "failed in its responsibility to provide oversight and direction in these very important community programs," said Assemblyman Scott Wildman, D-Los Angeles, chair of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee. Wildman's committee requested the state audit.

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Eastin and her staff say they have known about the problems for at least a year and have worked to shut down groups that appear to be defrauding the state. The audit is old news, they say, and reforms are in place or being written by a new management team.

"This team has tightened up the monitoring process and established a more systematic way to evaluate proposals," said Doug Stone, Eastin's spokesman.

"We've been dealing with this for some time."

The state audit released Tuesday focused on 10 community groups that, since 1994, have received federal funding to provide English and citizenship education for a small segment of the estimated 1.8 million documented immigrants in California.

But the audit paints a larger picture about how the state manages federal money for 86 community-based programs that received about $5 million in 1998-99 from taxpayers. Most immigrants get their English education at community colleges, not the community groups like those under scrutiny.

Several community groups working with immigrants also are being investigated by the FBI and the U.S. Department of Education for allegedly misusing the federal adult education money. Those probes arose after Hermandad Mexicana Nacional of Orange County was accused of registering non-citizens to vote in a hotly contested 1996 congressional race.

Eastin has cut off funding to Hermandad and asked for $4.3 million in grants to be returned. Hermandad says it has documentation that it gave English and citizenship lessons to thousands of immigrants, but the state audit says the group keeps "dubious and insufficient" records.

Three Bay Area groups - in San Jose, Santa Rosa and Oakland - were analyzed by the state audit and showed the least amount of problems among the 10 examined. Most of the auditor's complaints concerned sloppy record keeping.

One group, Lao Family Community Development Inc. in Oakland, may have, in fact, been treated unfairly by Eastin's staff, the audit says. Lao Family, which assists refugees, had its funding cut off after failing to provide proper records, the audit says, while other groups with similar problems escaped such harsh punishment.

"We didn't see any problems with fabricating records or any of those kinds of problems with Lao," said Ann Campbell, the principal auditor. "They were seeing a broad spectrum of immigrants. They just didn't have the supporting documentation" for their English-language program.

Campbell says the missing supporting documentation accounted for only a fraction of the $491,000 it received over four years. Everything else was supported, she says.

Chaosarn Chao, executive director of Lao Family, says many of his documents have been placed in storage, and have now been found. "I want them to come back," he said of the state auditors. "I have all the records. I have all the files."

The report's harshest words are saved for Eastin and her inspection staff of eight. They consistently ignored problems state auditors found in just two days of searching through records - after announcing their inspection ahead of time, according to the audit.

One organization based in Perris, Riverside County, was so sloppy about fabricating records that it claimed students were attending classes every single weekday from August 1997 until April 1998 - including Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day. They reported one student attending 3,406 hours of classes in a single year.

"To accumulate such a total, this student would have to attend an average of over nine hours of classes every day of the year," the audit said. "In all of these cases, we found the underlying scenarios impossible and concluded that the records were fabricated."

The same Perris-based group appeared to be fabricating test scores to fool state inspectors into thinking their students were improving, as required. Five students showed remarkable gains in their scores - from 33 to 55 points - when only exceptional students are expected to see 5-point gains.

And when a Department of Education inspector visited the One Stop Immigration and Education Center in Los Angeles, attendance records were checked but not testing documents. "Thus, the reviewers missed opportunities to examine . . . essential compliance issues," the audit said.

In some cases, Eastin's staff was approving funding levels that the immigrant groups clearly couldn't staff. Hermandad, for example, was awarded 21 million student hours in 1997-98, enough to provide 200 classes with 50 students each all year long. Hermandad only listed 42 classes on its application.

Eastin spokesman Stone and adult education manager Joan Polster say the department has an internal audit of problems within the program. They have shut off funding to three other programs beyond Hermandad, asked one Southern California group to repay $167,000, and hired new enforcement staff. &lt;